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Comment by jyriand | Hacker News Reader

I remember being very meticulous about my learning process and tried to build a sandcastle of knowledge. I had notebooks for every subject, I went over them every so often just to be sure I don't forget stuff etc. I was living in a 19th century time-frame and hoped to be one of those autodidacts, Renaissance men, polymaths who knew everything there was to know about the world they were living in. Romantic and vain dreams, that don't match our times.

I grew out of it and the truth is similar to Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap! So, why waste my time on trying to memorize stuff I don't really need, just to satisfy my own superiority complex and to feel like an erudite man? Now I'm using Just-In-Time approach: If I don't know or can't remember something, I will look it up.

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That's only true if you memorise facts at a surface level. If you're into history, then knowledge builds context. It gives you an increasingly higher resolution understanding of what was really going on.

Some knowledge must also be tied to real world experience. It took me a while to get the hang of navigating with the sun, but now I do it subconsciously.

The same can be said about programming, cooking, gardening, woodworking etc. You can't Google it when you need it, because it's a collection of techniques you pick up over time, with practice.

You can Google knowledge, but not wisdom.

JIT is what I learned in my higher education in the end, together with the rise of Google.

When learning programming, I had a book on Java; ended up reading the first two pages and doing the exercises, after that everything was a quick google away. So much Javadoc.

10-15 years on, pretty much the same. I feel like I've forgotten more than the renaissance men had learned by the time they got to my age. I think it's easy to underestimate how much you know now, compared to the romanticized 19th century fellows. And we're fairly common people, whereas those people were often in the higher circles of society (I mean a lot seemed to spend their time taking long walks to chat or write letters to their peers, doing science and philosophy and shit without having to worry about income. That may just be the romanticized view / biographer's fault though)

>I think it's easy to underestimate how much you know now, compared to the romanticized 19th century fellows

well, going back to the Renaissance men they might have known a greater percentage of available knowledge, but I don't know that anyone has figured out how much of that knowledge is wrong - obviously if someone is a polymath with a deep knowledge in alchemy, that deep knowledge should perhaps count as something of a negative.

It's a skill to notice when to simply look something up.

It's much easier to just get frustrated and blame some humans. That makes the time between an incident and simply looking something up even longer. Some people might never simply look something up as their frustrations exceed their lifetime.

How would you go about learning the most important thing that you have an eye on nowadays?

Because if there are no important topics, yes, I would stop to ponder.

Few days back I stumbled upon a video about Ramanujan [0] and the: 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 ..(to infinity) = -1/12.(Turns out the proof in the video is incorrect or at least not concise enough, because you can't do that with divergent series). So that got me curious and I wanted to understand what's going on. How can 1 + 2 .. etc equal to -1/12 and not infinity. So I went on small binge watching videos to get an intuition and understanding about this. This led me to Riemann Hypothesis and Euler's identities and complex numbers etc. Now I have a list of books that I want to skim/read to get a historical context around these problems. I don't take any notes just yet, because I don't know what is important and what is not, I just jump into the stuff and hope that when I come out of the other end I will at least have a understanding why it equals -1/12. It's like panning out gold, there might be some gold nuggets. And maybe, just by pure chance, I come up with some ridiculous ideas how to disprove Riemann Hypothesis ;P (I think I have to revisit Gödel, Escher, Bach and Gödel's Incompletness Theorems to prove that it's not provable).

- [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-I6XTVZXww

EDIT: Sorry to all facepalming mathematicians who happen to read this comment.

I'd recommend you study some real math for this. Popular science articles and books are great entertainment but are distinctly different from the real deal.

You don't become a surgeon by watching Dr. House or a historian by watching the history channel. Don't expect to understand math by reading a wikipedia article. To really get it, you need to dive deep and get your hands dirty.

To add to this, people underestimate how long it might take understand material on a proper level.

My favorite quote in Axler's linear algebra done right was that if you take less than an hour per page, your doing something wrong. I agree with him.

Don't get me wrong, learning math is definitely worthwhile, but please don't think you can skim some books and gain profound insights without hard work.

Yeah, I think JIT only works when you have an Internet connection or at least, a smartphone. Before them, I simply had to remember more stuff, now I can look up details any time (and my own notes don't take hundreds of A4 pages that I loathe going through anymore).

I think it's messed me up a bit, tbh. All I really remember now is the conclusion/result of a previous multi-hour/day learning quest. Why or how I arrived to that conclusion, I don't know. I just know that at the time I deemed it to be the correct answer ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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